AT&T , BellSouth lobbying congress for "two-tier" Internet

http://www.boston.com/business/technology/articles/2005/12/13/telecoms_want_their_products_to_travel_on_a_faster_internet/?page=2


AT&T Inc. and BellSouth Corp. are lobbying Capitol Hill for the right to create a two-tiered Internet, where the telecom carriers' own Internet services would be transmitted faster and more efficiently than those of their competitors.' The telcos basic fear, of course, is that the end to end design of the net (PDF version) will erode the telcos ability to use service charges to generate revenue for delivering video and voice; the proposed solution is to break end-to-end in order to protect pricing leverage over the users.

The proposal is certain to provoke a major fight with Google Inc., Yahoo Inc., Time Warner Inc., and Microsoft Corp., the powerful owners of popular Internet sites. The companies fear such a move would give telecommunications companies too much control over a fast-growing part of the Internet.

The battle is largely over video services. Several major telecom companies are working on ways to deliver broadcast-quality television over the Internet. Currently, online video can be slow to download and choppy to watch, even with higher-speed Internet services.

The proposal supported by AT&T and BellSouth would allow telecommunications carriers to offer their own advanced Internet video services to their customers, while rival firms' online video offerings would be transmitted at lower speed and with poorer image quality.

AT&T and other telecoms want to charge consumers a premium fee to connect to the higher-speed Internet. The companies could also charge websites a premium to offer their video to consumers on the higher-speed Internet. That could mean that a company like Yahoo might have to pay AT&T to send high-quality video to AT&T subscribers.

The prospect of a tiered Internet with ''regular" and ''premium" broadband services is spawning fierce debate as Congress takes up a major overhaul of telecom regulations. The House of Representatives last month held hearings on a preliminary draft by two GOP congressmen, Joe Barton of Texas and Fred Upton of Michigan, that would give the telecom companies the freedom to establish premium broadband services. The telecom bill is due for action early next year.


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If this goes thru it means the end of the Internet.

We the people are no longer bound by the telecommunications lines that currently bind us.

We have the technology to set up our own Wi-Fi networks to bypass the telecom's control.

The Internet as we know it may pass, but the Internet itself will not.

And they are going all out trying to get laws passed banning community WIFI.

This two-tiered bullshit must be stopped now.

Not possible.

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Seriously, if I'm offered a choice of carrier A that only some of my content comes down the pipe at high speed and carrier B where all of my content comes down the pipe at high speed, I'm gonna pick B. It's idiotic what some of these providers think about consumers. No wonder some of them are having a hard time!

... I read the analysis of the proposed legislation correctly. This seems to be an attempt to ensure that carrier B, in your scheme, is the telecom, for which it gets an increasingly higher payment for increased speed of access. Carrier A, then, is everyone else who doesn't own the highest speed lines, but merely connects to them, and must raise their rates to pay the fees to Carrier B to maintain transfer of content at the same speed.

Therefore, the intent of the legislation is for everyone to pay more, with the profits accruing to Carrier B, the telecom.

Cheers.

mikey_the_rat

That's what they want to do....throw up speedbumps to penalize people who won't pay them money for premium higher speed access to thier customers. It's extortion.

Imagine if AT&T wanted to charge double for better sounding telephone audio.

Most places you have the choice between DSL or CABLE, sometimes you only have one or the other, sometimes you don't have either one.

And a lot of consumers aren't as sophisticated as you and may not understand what the ISP is doing.

They found themselves with a spare switching building in heavily flooded east New Orleans, largely intact but too far from any functional services to be useful to them. So they proposed to donate the building to the city for use as an emergency operations center.

And then it happened: The city went ahead and built its own free wireless network, the first in the country by the way, in a city that up until now has not been known for innovation of any kind besides cultural and culinary.

BellSouth's response: "Waaaaah! We're gonna take our switching building and go home!" For all I know it might end up being demolished because some megacorporation couldn't stand a little competition. And to add insult to injury, they are now talking about moving over 200 jobs out of the city, which did not exactly have an abundance of high-paying professional jobs even "pre-K".

Oh, by the way, megacorporate slimeballs: Clue phone! It's for you: there already is a higher-speed Internet, called Internet 2. True, it's largely used by academia -- but then, that was the case with "Internet 1" even fifteen years ago...

Cedar Rapids/Iowa City Corridor and another one...Marshalltown or Newton I believe.

(sorry) and, is it the city or U of Iowa in Iowa City?

And you might be right...I don't think any of the Iowa areas are up and running yet.

The Corridor wireless project (Cedar Rapids and Iowa City) is mainly downtown areas in both cities (which in Iowa City would be most of the U), and then in North Liberty (a small suburbish town on the interstate between the two).

So you are probably right..it might be THE first one.

and of course the gop is sucking up the smoke these telecom nuts are spewing. Once again I remind new orleans to use eminent domain to take that building from bell south.

Just ask Kenny Boy Mehlman, Rove, McClellan, or Gannon.

they are not nessesary. Their business is gone, now they want us all to legislate a steady income for them, why? because their entiled to have their business never fail or change? This is Crony capitalism at it's best.

What's to stop MSN, Yahoo!, Google, et al to charge telecommunication companies to access their sites?

Nothing....Nada....

Not too bright if you ask me....

Another option: MSN, Yahoo!, Google, et al acquire their own telecom company and REALLY raise fees to other telecom cos for the right to access their sites...

Just sayin', not exactly the best thought out plan I've encountered recently.

Other than to enrich the telecom companies (to the detriment of the consumer). They are really getting more and more blatant with this crap.

They are pissed off that they are in a low-margin business and they want Congress to fix thier problem. They could try to be a service of value in addition to being the pipe that carries the services but I guess it's easier to get Congress to pass a law so you can bastardize the internet in order to increase your revenue growth.

If they want to raise revenue all they need to do is raise prices on DSL access. But since the free market will penalize them they need to subvert the free market.

Really. As if my ISP (time-warner) doesn't have the bucks to find an alternative!
It's not like *low speeds* will teribly affect the little providers, who often are the only option in town!
It's not like customer connection pooling wouldn't happen to get around this!
Geez, these companies just won't learn, you can't keep good tech and ideas down!
:eyes:

The Internet is usually described with a three-tier model, and the borders among the tiers are a little hazy. Tier One is the few ISPs like the one I work for, with the greatest network capacity and the most peering (tit-for-tat trading of traffic with no other payment) agreements. Tier Three are the little mom 'n' pop ISPs that have only one way out to the Internet. Bell South falls squarely in between, at Tier Two, with multiple peers and networks that don't span the globe.

This model isn't likely to change, really, but it could be flattened, effectively, by agreements whereby Tier Two traffic is handled with special priority by the Tier One providers. The same sort of agreement could flatten Tier Two into Tier Three.

Routers, the machines that handle Internet traffic, are getting smarter, and the selective assigment of priority to traffic is within reach of the most powerful processors without bogging down other traffic severely.